An approach based on process mining to assess the quarantine strategies' effect in reducing the COVID-19 spread

Purpose The feasibility of process mining combined with simulation techniques in estimating the effectiveness of COVID-19 prevention strategies on infection and mortality trends to determine best practices is assessed in this study. The quarantine event log is built from the CUSP (the COVID-19 US State Policy) database, where the dates of implemented social policies in the USA to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic are documented. Design/methodology/approach COVID-19 is a highly infectious disease leading to a very high death toll worldwide. In most countries, the governments have resorted to a series of drastic strategies to prevent the outbreak by restricting the activities and movement among their population for a predefined time. Heretofore, different approaches have been published to estimate quarantine strategies and the majority signify the positive effect on managing this pandemic. Notably, the process perspective of COVID-19 datasets is of less concern among researchers. The purpose of this paper is to exploit the process mining techniques to model and analyze the quarantine implementation processes. Findings The discovered process model has 51 process variants for 51 cases (states), which indicate the quarantine activities were executed in different orders and periods during the pandemic. The time interval analysis between activities reveals the states with the most extended quarantine periods. These primary process mining insights are applied to define scenarios and variables of an agent-based model. The simulation findings indicate a meaningful relation between enforcing quarantine strategies and a declining trend of infection by 90% in the case of following strict quarantine and mask mandates. It is observed that in the post-quarantine period, the disease repeats its ascending trend unless implementation of different intervention strategies likes vaccination. Originality/value This study is the first in introducing process mining techniques in analyzing the COVID-19 quarantine strategies impact. The findings provide valuable insights for policymakers to proper control strategies and the process mining research community in expanding more process-related analysis on this pandemic. Also, the results have broad implications for research in other fields like information science to estimate the impact of quarantine strategies on process patterns in library systems.